Windows 8 Developer Build was released a few days ago with an overwhelming response from the enthusiasts all over the world,with as many as 500,000 downloads in less than 24 hrs of its launch.

The Developer Preview included many new Windows 8 features like the Metro UI ,Charm and lots of other things,one of the  interesting features is the picture password which i demonstrated in a video of how to set up a picture password on Windows 8.This feature uses the gesture points selected on the picture like the tap or circles and the  feature captures those gestures as the picture password for entering at the login time.

Recently Microsoft  has submitted the patent claim for Picture Password feature.

Here’s what the patent abstract reads:

A graphical password authentication method is based on sketches drawn by user. The method extracts a template edge orientation pattern from an initial sketch of the user and an input edge orientation pattern from an input sketch of the user, compares the similarity between the two edge orientation patterns, and makes an authentication decision based on the similarity. The edge orientations are quantized, and each edge orientation pattern includes a set of quantized orientation patterns each corresponding to one of the quantized edge orientations. The number of quantized edge orientations, as well as other parameters such as the dimension of the final orientation patterns and acceptance threshold, can be optimized either globally or user-specifically.

Read the rest of the patent details Here